Intern skillshare!

Hi my name is Eddie Hernandez, and I’m a rising 12th grader at Phillips Exeter Academy located in New Hampshire. I’m also a summer intern at Hive NYC.

Recently, I joined Wilson and Zainab–the two other Hive NYC summer interns–for a meeting with the teen interns at the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea.

Hive NYC Kitchen Table event with Rubin Museum of Art Teens

When the groups first met, neither of us knew what we were in for, but I was sure that we were prepared to share what we had learned. The Rubin Museum, recently joining Hive NYC earlier this year, started off by showing their teen tumblr page. It was created by the interns at the Rubin as a way to “spread the word of the Rubin and also to spread the word of Himalayan art and events!” They had spent the summer posting about the museum’s exhibitions and art works. Some of them didn’t even know much about Himalayan art when they first started posting, but that wasn’t the case when it came to explaining when we came down to visit them: they were full of confidence and exuberance. Besides posting, these interns help out on tours by explaining to museum visitors the many exhibitions that they’ve come to be so familiar with.

The Hive NYC interns, trying to match them, displayed Thimble, which is part of Mozilla’s website full of tools and projects for webmaking. These projects are a way for anyone to learn the basics of HTML/CSS, the code that allows webpages to be formatted the way they are. Some of the projects are mini-games which is what grasped the attention of the Rubin interns the most.

After the brief presentations, the two separated into smaller groups that contained at least one member from each side. These three smaller groups each had different things they wanted to accomplish by the end of the day. I helped one group display music on their Tumblr page and also learned from the Rubin intern how to make a Tumblr page as presentable as theirs. Wilson helped another group figure out how to make a game based on one of the projects, “Bunny Masher,” that would feature the Himalayan monster “Yeti”. Zainab’s group made an animated gif, which is a sequence of images that are displayed as being animated in a video-like way.

In all, the event was a huge success: the first group was able to display music on the Rubin teen tumblr page as well as teaching me how to make a pretty Tumblr page, Wilson was able to start their Yeti game and they’re going to continue working on it now with the knowledge of being able to code from some of the other projects on Thimble, and finally Zainab helped the interns at Rubin to accomplish creating a GIF of about a few seconds. This experience was like no other in the sense that there was no instructor. We separated into small groups and shared with each other about what we’ve learned during our internships. Not only was it different, but it was definitely enriching and we hope to do this again in the future!